University of Colorado BoulderANNA-RUTH ALLEN is a research associate in the School of Education at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her research interests include sociocultural approaches to discourse, literacy and learning, after-school programs, and youth development. Publications include “Learning as the Organizing of Social Futures” (2010, National Society for the Study of Education) with Kevin O’Connor; “‘Becoming’ a Teacher” (2007, Teachers College Record) with Mary Louise Gomez and Rebecca Black; and “Language, Class, and Identity: Teenagers Fashioning Themselves Through Language” (2001, Linguistics and Education) with Jim Gee and Katherine Clinton.

This chapter presents an introduction to design-based implementation research (DBIR). We describe the need for DBIR as a research approach that challenges educational researchers and practitioners to transcend traditional research/practice barriers to facilitate the design of educational interventions that are effective, sustainable, and scalable. We examine antecedents to DBIR, including evaluation research, community-based participatory research, design-based research, and implementation research. The four core principles of DBIR are explained: (1) a focus on persistent problems of practice from multiple stakeholders’ perspectives; (2) a commitment to iterative, collaborative design; (3) a concern with developing theory and knowledge related to both classroom learning and implementation through systematic inquiry; and (4) a concern with developing capacity for sustaining change in systems. We close with an overview of the chapters contained in this NSSE Yearbook on DBIR and explain how each chapter contributes to the overall development of the DBIR approach.

This chapter argues for a view of learning as a collective accomplishment that is a matter not only of gaining particular knowledgeable skills through participation in social practices, but also of organizing the conditions under which participation becomes recognized as valuable. This requires that research on learning place a central focus on this organizing work, which takes place in different locations and on different timescales, in order to adequately examine the processes through which participation is made to be consequentially successful or
not.